


Five Hundred Word Essay

by lferion



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Community: highlander50, Counted Word Fic, Gen, Introspection, Meta, NaNoWriMo, Timed Fic, Word Play, Writing Exercise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-04
Updated: 2011-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-14 10:31:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/148308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/pseuds/lferion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Methos contemplates a timed-writing assignment</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Hundred Word Essay

**Author's Note:**

> Written during NaNoWriMo, on an evening where I had half-an-hour to write the 500 words that would fulfill my quota for the day. This was the result, achieved within the time limit.
> 
> Highlander 50 prompt 50: Writer's Choice - "Words"  
> My Highlander50 table [On DW](http://lferion.dreamwidth.org/104046.html), [On LJ](http://lferion.livejournal.com/87640.html)

Five hundred words in half-an-hour? What was this, some kind of speed-writing contest? Who could come up with the best persiflage and piffle? Did it matter what language it was in, what script or notation? Could he dictate or did it have to be written, keyboard or writing-stick or the implement that he'd used to press cuneiform shapes in clay, cut Ogham into branches, bruise birch leaves with runes? Would flint-scratched symbols count? Though there, while a symbol meant more than a thousand words, it took far more than half-an-hour to set one into sandstone, where it would last. Sticks in clay were faster, brisk brush-work on papyrus, or gall-ink traced on parchment. Swifter still were words of air, shouted to the gods, declaimed to patient, waiting ears, whispered, barely breathed in shadows to pass the stories on. It was the stories themselves that mattered, not the words that lent them shape and sound; it was the breath that gave them life, the will that told them, the ears that listened. And the meaning that was made between the teller and the tale and the one that heard.

Words were stones, symbols, markers, graves for thought. Words could force or cause to flinch, wound or heal, make or unmake, cast lie and lie together and make truth a greater sin. Words shaped the world, the form of thought, the understanding of the universe and what place a person had within. Words bound and freed, sealed and shattered, made sacred and profane. Blessings, curses, _cri-du-coeur_ and epitaph, threnody and paean. All words.

But without eyes or ears all words were silent, shouted in the sunlight or scribbled in the dark. Once released from one mind another must needs be found, a different mind, in time or space or simple alter-state. The message mattered more than any medium.

Five hundred words. Five centuries, half a thousand, a quarter-hundred score, a monkey, a ream, a cohort. Mathematical and literal, chaff or dust or coin paid out in blood. What was a word?

Methos — Adam Pierson, new enrolled at St Andrews college, Durham university — looked down at the blank, defenseless page: an essay, English, what do they teach them in these schools? what do these unformed creatures know? Professors ask: Can they shape a sentence, form a thought? What mysteries of punctuation might be known, misused, impenetrable conundrum unplumbed? What would he write, in unstructured prose, a boy home-schooled, admitted based on test-scores and reports? Methos could not write this thing, it must be Adam. What had Adam yet to say? What was his voice? How did he hold his pen? Did he bite his lip in concentration, furrow brow or seek to see the middle-distance and find inspiration there?

Adam weighed pen in hand, the paper still all possibility, pristine and blank as snow, as empty air, as a breath undrawn and unexpressed. Blank slate. Smooth rock, clean sand. All new, all yet to come. Five hundred words in half an hour. What would he say? Bend the neck, press nib to surface and begin, unknowing. Just … Begin.

The words will tell you who you are, and what they have to say to you. The words themselves will speak, do you but listen. Pin them to the paper: write, and read, and learn.


End file.
